First You Need a Big Pot

I'd never cared for food prepared on a massive family-reunion scale. Vast bowls of baked beans, elbow-deep pails of coleslaw, giant foil trays of chicken, even the smaller casseroles pitched in from afar. It's an overlarge task, and since everyone helps, no one is responsible. In this way, one Saturday starts to taste like any other.

Then I found myself renting a large house off the Carolina coast with a pack of friends. Nineteen or twenty people minimum, sometimes as many as thirty, every night. A lot of hamburgers, that — it was like Ann-Margret up in there with all the baked beans. The repetition was deadening. So when my turn came, I insisted on going solo. I dug through a cookbook, found a recipe for bouillabaisse. Then tripled it.

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When you cook on a large scale, every rule is suspended, redefined, altered. I required equipment I never knew existed, had to rent a stockpot from a seafood place, a pot so big, a baby could have slept in it. As I left, a black guy in kitchen whites jogged out after me, handing me a wooden spoon the size of a Little League baseball bat. "No charge," he told me. He looked at the food splayed across my backseat. "Cooking big, huh? That is hard. You gotta turn that soup over. And you don't need no heat at all. Just time."

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The volume of food — the mussels, the clams, the fish and crab, the sacks of vegetables — scared me, and the money, pitched in from everyone, made me feel the responsibility in my ribs. I cooked all afternoon, attentive and focused as a librarian. Then at five o'clock, thinking I was due a break, I left things simmering, slipped into the hot tub, drank something icy, and congratulated myself for going the long way, on my own.

Thirty minutes. That was all. Even on the lowest heat, the bottom of the soup burned. And when the bottom of a soup burns, that char flavors the whole soup. I served it anyway. People were pleasant. They appreciated that I'd shot high. Still, it killed the room.

The time. The money. The promises. I learned every lesson I needed to learn in that one disaster: Cooking big is hard. Being attentive means staying that way until the food is on the table. Lose pretension. The volume of food means it's acceptable to make menu choices that might seem pedestrian but that are relatively easy to goose up. Chili, with Italian-style pork ribs added at the end. Corn bread, but with a little pancetta and sun-dried tomatoes. Like that. And don't go it alone when it isn't necessary. Cooking with others is a pleasure that pride should not impede.

On the night with the bouillabaisse, no one called me out. Eventually, someone pulled out some hot dogs — "for the kids" — and a Tupperware container of leftover beans to reheat in the microwave. I didn't object. We drank wine. Some left my soup uneaten, others insisted it was great. Meanwhile the grill was lit, plates were set out. Even I helped. We were quick about it. It was a team effort.